Firm says its objective is to help its customers "exploit" their "rights globally"

Here in the U.S. the legal campaigns of
the RIAA and MPAA are the subject of long standing controversy.
Decisions like the $1.92M
USD verdict against mother Jammie-Thomas Rassert for 24 songs
(allegedly representative of large infringement), largely divide the
public, with some advocating suing infringers out of house and home
and others blasting the tactics as thuggish and evidence of a
out-of-touch
intellectual property system.

The UK appears headed for
more of this kind of controversy, as the law firm ACS:Law
just secured approval from the Royal Courts of Justice in London
to demand the addresses and personal info on 30,000
users from their internet service providers (ISPs). The
customers covered by the so-called Norwich Pharmacal Order are
"suspected" involvement with the illegal file sharing
(P2P) of approximately 291 movie titles. Of the suspected
infringers, 25,000 had IP's with the UK service provider BT.

ACS:Law
plans to try to shake down those who may have infringed, sending them
threats to pay up or face a battle in court. Judging by past
settlements in the U.S., most of these cases will likely be settled
for a few thousand dollars. The letters do give some suspects
an out by saying that if they think their connection was
illegitimately reportedly used they can seek a solution, such as
implicating possible suspects. IP addresses are easily faked,
hijacked, redirected and generally abused in ways that the systems
employed by these kinds of trackers cannot detect.

Copyright
protection organizations and their legal bulldogs have recently been
particularly at odds with BT. Their fury was
particularly provoked when the UK Internet Service Providers
Association which represents the ISP and others in June concluded
that they were "not confident in [ACS:Law's] ability to identify
[ILLEGAL] users." ACS:Law fired back that BT was
"shameful" for not taking greater action to prevent
filesharing. BT said such actions would violate its
users' right privacy.

ACS: Law describes its company's
objective, writing, "We are a law firm which specialises in
assisting intellectual property rights holders exploit and enforce
their rights globally. Illegal file sharing costs the creative
industries billions of pounds every year. The impact of this is huge,
resulting in job losses, declining profit margins and reduced
investment in product development. Action needs to be taken and we
believe a coordinated effort is needed now, before irreparable damage
is done. "

Britain is
home to some of the most aggressive copyright enforcement efforts.
Politicians with the majority Labour Party are looking to terminate
filesharers who commit three offenses, forcing their ISPs to
suspend their accounts. British copyright organizations also
recently threatened to sue
a singing store employee, only to eventually back down.

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Ok this is getting ridicolous. We need to adress this issue as a race of beeings rather then countries with ideas. Because this is simply stealing from them because they stole from you, anarchy. And now that it's spreading, we'd best take care of it.

Here is the real problem: How can we find value in something that has no value?

Value has always arrived from scarcity. Why was gold used as the material for coins? Because it was scarce. Dirt isn't worth anything because... it's everywhere.

Anything digital isn't scarce. It can be replicated against almost no cost. That we choose to pay millions for dirt doesn't change the fact it's dirt. Can you even imagine getting sued because you stole another guy's dirt?

And it gets worse! We can also replicate money as much as we like. It's just numbers on somebody's computer. Last i heard only like 3% of the money in america is actually printed. So technically where paying for something that does not have value with something that does not have value! But stuff like chairs, or desks, or anything solid that does have value, can be bought with something that does not have value.

Change is needed, we need to redefine value and what it actually is. With it, related terms like profit need to be redefined. Afterall, you cannot have made a profit if you've only collected more stuff without value.

I wish i had the sollution, but alas i'm not nearly smart enough. Maybe collectively, over time, we can come up with something though.

It's not just these organizations. Yes they are insane, totally agree. And if copyright wasn't such an issue in itself they would find something else to leech off. They are like the torrent sites: kill one and more will take it's place. But that doesn't mean copyright isn't still an issue, that will go away if these organizations go away.

I mean i'm still figuring out how to explain that i paid 50 euro's for something i can duplicate by going "ctrl+c, ctrl+v". Does that mean i have 2 items worth 50 euro's? Their both equal in every single way.

Then it blows my mind that, take a movie for instance, some company sunk $120 million dollars into something that i can duplicate by going "ctrl+c, ctrl+v".

Suppose that the instant the master file was created which is then copied, it would be instantly copied to everybody's computer via a giant P2P network. The instant that happens, the file is completly worthless since everybody has it. That's actually technically *possible*.

Try using "ctrl+c, ctrl+v" with a chair. The one your sitting on. Just make sure it isn't connected to the internet and they'll never know.

*falls down*

Ah crap, i'll be back later, My chair's motherboard just fried and it dissapeared under me. Now i gotta go to the store to get a new one then talk an hour with MicroSit support to renew my licence so i can sit down again.

The good thing about pirating is not having to pay money for a movie that I think is garbage like Underworld Evolution.

I agree with OP's Statement that these products are worth as much as dirt. In digital form, it is worth nothing.

A good strategy, instead of cruelly putting a mother in 1,000,000 in debt and possibly out of a home, would be to fix the economy, ban the RIAA and MPAA from operating inside the US, and start requiring websites like Pirate bay to become a private website like demonoid to protect its users.

Probably because he hadn't watched it before buying it, I would expect. That is why piracy can be a good thing-- you only end up buying stuff you like (including stuff you like you would not have considered buying had you not been able to view it for free first), whilst the rubbish gets watched once (or possibly not even all the way through if it is that bad) and deleted with whoever published it receiving no money for churning out junk.

Well, that would be nice. This weekend I was dragged by friends to see Ninja Assassin. A terrible movie even by ninja movie standards. I walked out wishing I could get my money back and I immediately watched something at home to try to forget the horrible movie. If I'm alone or with only my wife, we will often walk out of the middle of movies and get our money back, but with freinds, I'm obliged to stay the whole time. Yes, I think they should still give me back the money at the end, especially movies where the end ruins the whole movie. It's like they stole the money from me and didn't deliver what was promised (entertainment).

People out there who pay big bucks for mega-fast connections do it so they can download big files at top speed.I bet most of these 'big files' are either games, movies or music - mostly pirated!The only reason they pay for the fast connections and not your standard slow connection (which is actuclly no slower for web pages), is because they 'save' money by not buying games/movies/music.

So if the ISP's started handing over user details to lawyers, then people are going to jump ship and head to the next ISP who doesn't do this.If all the ISPs started giving out user details, then I can guarentee you that sales of the premium/fast connections would plummet.No one's going to pay a small fortune for a 20mb or 50mb connection for browsing the web...

Broadband providers would lose a fortune, so there's absolutely no way they'd want to work with any lawyers to get their users into trouble.

quote: I bet most of these 'big files' are either games, movies or music - mostly pirated! The only reason they pay for the fast connections and not your standard slow connection (which is actuclly no slower for web pages), is because they 'save' money by not buying games/movies/music

So because I pay a bit more to have a 50mbit connection I must therefore pirate games/films etc?

Lets see how well i can view web pages on a 'standard slow connection' while someone is watching sky player over the internet in another room, whilst another of my housemates is streaming a HD film from the xbox live marketplace.

There are plenty of legal bandwidth intensive applications, lots in fact that use up a lot more of your bandwidth than downloading a film or an album.

Maybe your statement would have been valid ten years ago but even then i'd say that you were making a huge assumption..

In the past, this was handled by patronage. When a king or church wanted a "piece of art", they would actually sponsor artists (with quite substantial amounts) to create the work, after which it can be distributed with any of this "copyright law" nonsense:

"From ancient world onward patronage of the arts was important in art history. It is known in greatest detail in reference to pre-modern medieval and Renaissance Europe, though patronage can also be traced in feudal Japan, the traditional Southeast Asian kingdoms, and elsewhere—art patronage tended to arise wherever a royal or imperial system and an aristocracy dominated a society and controlled a significant share of resources. Samuel Johnson defined a patron as "one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help".[1]"

This causes several things:1. It encourages distribution of creative works (which directly benefits the artist in reputation), as opposed to "control" by a monolithic organization,2. It provides at least decent pay for artists,3. It removes the income equality we have now (95% barely make a living, the other 5% have multi-million dollar mansions,4. It directly connects pay with merit, as opposed to the incentive of profit.

The real problem is though not copyright itself, but rather who controls it. Copyright was intended as a way for authors to protect their OWN work and ideas from being stolen. Gradually, this became not the case as organization that supposedly help artists enforce their own copyrights (e.g. RIAA) now in effect own them - the artist becomes an asset, and the record company for all financial purposes "produced" the work. Royalties are simply an admission of this; if an artist truly owned his/her copyrights, we wouldn't need royalties as they would sell their work in free markets.

We've already dealt quite nicely with the question of value, something like 500 years ago with the concept of copyright and patent laws.

Faced with the reality that an unprotected idea is easily copied, society realized that protections on the use of an idea were necessary to ensure people would devote time and resources to creating new ideas - methods, technologies, as well as entertainment. Without some protection, it would always be cheaper to wait for someone else to create a new idea, then copy it. Thus, no one would spend the resources to create, and society stagnates.

So we created a system where the rights of usage of an idea were limited to it's creator, and usage by other required permission and licensing. That way, there was a good financial motivation to innovate.

The system has worked absolutely marvelously, as a quick look around the wide array of technology available to us in our everyday lives will attest.

The digital age hasn't changed the validity of the underlying concepts one bit. Allowing people to control access to their ideas lets the machinery of capitalism work on the level of ideas, and letting it do that was provided huge benefits for our civilization. Discarding that out of fear of corporate profiteering is a fool's bargain, as it's that machinery of profiteering that has gotten us this far to begin with.